On A Summer Evening Walk in San Marcos, Texas, I Remember Mary Oliver

By Oscar Houck

The midnight moon, full and gracious,
has softened the river from its deep greens and blues

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to silver.
Crickets and cicadas in the cottonwoods
set up a metallic cacophony such that
if I didn't know better,
I would think I was
walking through a machine.
Maybe a giant watch,
with all its internal gears
whirring and clicking.
But I do know better.
 

This is a church,

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where the congregants
speak in tongues
that only they can understand.

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And the fireflies are votive candles,
whose yellow-gold radiance
flickers against
the indigo night sky,
where someone
has spread salt,
incandescent grains of starlight,
the way farmers used to broadcast seed, by hand,
over the fallow soil of spring.

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The river
is one long, baptismal font of motion.
It whispers vespers,
in the low murmur
of water over stones.

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The priest however, has gone missing
and so,
the liturgy is left to us.

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The world is so obviously alive
despite our best efforts to destroy it.
And we have been allowed here

in spite of it all,
to worship.

 

Let us pray to the mystery
we are a part of,
rather than trying
to own it.

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For every day here is a gift and holy.
And every night here is holy.

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Amen.